• ‘N u there p?
• L yes b.
• N Working on this Diego thing
• L how is it
• N It’s making me think about my Kreol. Did I tell you how I lost it?
• L I know you mourn it
• N It was the first language I knew
• L the first one you spoke?
• N y. the only one. Til I went to nursery school and no one understood me. They told my folks to speak English to me. So Kreol became language of adults/familial authority
• L Didn’t you know any kids who spoke it?
• N nope.
• N I never stopped understanding it
• N but the speaking seized up
• L Funny when you think how under colonialism, use of pidgins/creoles by colonised subjects = justification for colonials to infantilise them, while English = language of authority…
• L Have you read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness’?
• N No. Send!’

—Enn Gramaten

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.